Hi, I'm Youssef and I'm a member of the technical staff at Microsoft AI based in Palo Alto. I've previously worked at Palantir, Color, and Inflection AI. These are the long-form chronicles of my adventures building software.
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Introducing SparkID: fast, sortable, compact unique IDs
March 28, 2026 · 8 min readUUIDs and nanoid are the go-to choices for generating unique IDs, but both come with tradeoffs. In this post, I introduce SparkID, a library for generating time-sortable, strictly monotonic, 21-character unique IDs in JavaScript, Python, and Rust. -
When to upgrade open-source packages: a cost-benefit analysis
February 16, 2025 · 5 min readBy applying cost-benefit analysis from economics, I delve into how developers can make informed choices about upgrading dependencies in production systems. -
Animating a progress bar with CSS scroll-driven animations
December 31, 2023 · 3 min readScroll-driven animations are an exciting new addition to CSS. In this post, we build a scroll-linked progress bar that fills up as you scroll down the page. -
Transferring cookies from one domain to another
November 14, 2023 · 4 min readMigrating session cookies from one domain to another is trickier than it seems. In this post, I explore how we approached this problem at Inflection AI. -
Async iteration of Server-sent events with stream-event-source
October 21, 2023 · 2 min readAsynchronous iteration seems especially well suited for Server-sent events. In this post, we introduce a new npm package for reading SSEs through the async iteration protocol.